FROM MOUNTAIN MEDIA
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED NOV. 30, 1997
As Congress adjourns for the holidays, it's tempting to agree with Will Rogers that our wallets are safe once again.
Unfortunately, Mr. Rogers spoke before Congress invented the "withholding tax."
But White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles did take the opportunity on Nov. 21 to issue what amounts to a congressional "year-end wrapup" on behalf of the Clinton White House.
Mr. Bowles was honest enough to admit there were a number of areas where the administration "came up short" of its goals, including failure to win fast-track trade authority, failure to pass the McCain-Feingold "campaign finance reform" bill, and failure to win a congressional OK to spend more money bailing out the currencies of Malaysia, Thailand, and South Korea.
Thank goodness.
If President Clinton wants free trade, he should propose reducing all tariffs across the board -- unilaterally -- as the British did in the 1850s, and forget about these loophole-ridden "treaties."
While I hold no animus for our Asian trading partners, propping up other nations' currencies at unrealistic levels is not worth a dime of American tax money -- even if such interventions could produce anything but bigger crashes, in the long run.
"Campaign finance reform"? The high court has ruled that campaign donations are "speech," protected under the First Amendment. Can government limit our free public speech to two paragraphs? To two dozen? The only way to start breaking up the scandalous national "incumbent protection racket" is to eliminate all dollar limits, entirely.
Needless to say, these "failings" did not leave Mr. Bowles with no accomplishments to brag about.
Quite to the contrary, the White House chief of staff says Democrats "had a good year," starting with the achievement of "the first bipartisan balanced budget in a generation," producing "real savings in excess of $900 million."
Mr. Bowles also brags about achieving "the largest increase in education funding in 30 years," "the largest increase in health care for children since Medicaid in 1965," and the offer of NATO membership to Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary.
Mr. Bowles also brags that "We were able to pass provisions that will enable us to move 2 million people from welfare to work. ..."
Oh, and lest we forget ... as the president began his journey to Kyoto to sign a greenhouse gas treaty which could cripple industrial progress for decades ... Mr. Bowles' "strong record of accomplishment" also listed the "toughest new air quality standards in a generation."
The most striking thing about this list, of course, is that virtually every "accomplishment" describes an increase in funding and intrusiveness for a government program ... despite Mr. Clinton's famous assurance that "The era of big government is over."
Even that $900 million in "real savings" is a reduction only from hoped-for levels. As real federal expenditures continue to climb for everything but the Armed Forces, I can't help but wonder what definition of "real" the White House is using.
In fact, this ongoing celebration of a federal budget now "balanced" is surely one of the great examples of willful popular delusion and the madness of crowds to surface in modern times. If this were a private business, the chief financial officer would even now be high-tailing it for some third world nation bereft of an extradition treaty, one step ahead of a bow-tied auditor breathing the dreaded words "unfunded liabilities."
But the other amusing aspect of this list of accomplishments is that -- in the few cases where a little real good has been done, like kicking long-time welfare recipients off the dole -- the real momentum here came from the Republican Congress, with Mr. Clinton shuffling along behind the parade, muttering that they'd better watch out, because none of it sounded terribly "fair" to him.
Everyone is in favor of clean air. The problem with piling any more such billion-dollar straws on the camel's back of American industry -- in search of minuscule further improvements -- is that the effects of such "progress" can take as much as a decade to make themselves felt. By the time the plants close and the workers hit the soup lines, it's a tad late to "ease off a bit."
Finally, as to the Clinton foreign policy: What does "membership in NATO" really mean?
Doesn't it mean America is committed to sending her sons and daughters to defend those member nations if attacked?
Does anyone today believe Bill Clinton would risk his fragile popularity to lead us to war in defense of Hungary or Czechoslovakia, as neither Dwight Eisenhower nor Lyndon Johnson was foolish enough to do when the tanks rolled in before, in 1956 and 1968?
The Clinton legacy: Truly, time will tell.
Vin Suprynowicz is the assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. The column is syndicated in the United States and Canada via Mountain Media Syndications, P.O. Box 4422, Las Vegas Nev. 89127.
-- Samuel Adams